User blog:Mlp Soarin/The Mane Event
Playing one of the "mane six" in this RP has turned seriously weird in the past year. Weird, and exhausting, and often not very fun. Instead of hanging out with your pony friends, having big adventures and tons of fun, you find yourself fending off a seemingly never-ending stream of demands ranging from "Please give my character a purpose!" to "Stop what you're doing right now and talk to me!" to "I'm doing a world-breaking story that makes no sense in MLP-- and I insist that you be part of it!" It wears you down. Eventually it becomes easier to just not post, because you know it's just going to get you a barrage of "stuff you have to deal with." And worse, because none of the other ''manes are posting either, for the same reasons, you feel isolated and like all your friends are gone. Surrounded by a sea of demanding ponies, you feel all alone. Frankly, playing a mane can be depressing. The Peculiar Snobbery of OCs Part of the difficulty in being such a high-profile character, is that you're among the only characters that new players see-- and a lot of the time, they'll glomp onto you and not let go. It's a natural enough instinct, but the cumulative effect of tons of players doing this is devastating. : '''500 OCs:' "Nopony's interacting with me!" : 6 Manes: "Nopony will leave me alone!" You'd think the easy and natural solution would be for OCs to talk to each other, right? I mean, they're all lonely, the manes are all swamped. Easy peasy! Except, that's not what happens. Like the guy who ignores the quiet girl in class and complains "I can't get a date!" because the cheerleader snubbed him, many OC players steadfastly ignore any and all attempts by the manes to introduce them to other. : Lonely OC: "AppleJack! I want some ice cream." : AppleJack: "You know, @mlp_Ian makes great ice cream!" : Lonely OC: "Can you give me some ice cream, AppleJack?" : @mlp_Ian: *sigh* : AppleJack: *sigh* I've said this before, but I'll say it again. If you play an OC character, please, please, please ''find some other OCs to be pals with instead of clinging onto one (or more) of the manes! You'll double your fun, and double the other player's fun, and take some of the load off the manes. And it's not like we don't ''ever want to interact with you. But there are 'thousands '''of #TwitterPonies. We can't hang out with them all at once. It's just not possible! The Guidelines: Read Them. Abide By Them. Or I Will Ignore You. The Guidelines are easy to find: http://twitterponies.wikia.com/wiki/Guidelines Boom. They get announced and posted two or three times a week. They are the rules of this game. If you don't follow them, I won't play with you. It's that simple. They were written by the #TwitterPonies for the #TwitterPonies. If you don't wish to follow them, that's fine, go off and have fun doing whatever it is you want to do. I won't be coming along. If you're trying to get around the Guidelines in #TwitterPonies, you're doing it wrong. If you want to argue about the Guidelines in #TwitterPonies, you're doing it wrong. If you don't want to play by the Guidelines, then enjoy whatever it is you're doing and have a nice day. But I'm not playing with you. You wouldn't enjoy it much if I did, anyhow. Getting By With a Little Help From My Friends Here's the meat of the problem. I can't remember when's the last time AppleJack had an extended scene with her best friends. Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Twilight Sparkle, and Spike all feel like strangers to me now. Roseluck and Alberio are unwilling to approach AJ because they'd have to fight through a sea of players to get to me. My own OCs are quiet and floundering because it takes so much mental energy to deal with all the noise of playing AppleJack. I don't see any way around this problem other than to, well, start being "more cliquish." I don't want to snub people, but by Celestia's beard, ''I want to spend some time with my friends. And the only way to do that, it seems, is by ignoring as well as I can the constant attention being demanded of me by so many others. That's a trap, of course: because if my friends go quiet (and they have before), I may end up with nopony to talk to at all. But what I'm doing now sure as hay isn't working. What other option do I have? Category:Blog posts